Security

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Are Cookies & Spyware one and the same?

Can anyone help me out here in understanding if a cookie is the same as spyware?

From what I here, you now need to have spyware software installed on PCs for the following reasons: 1. Protect your privacy 2. Elivate junk off PCs to get better performance. 3. Elimate protential virus problems.

No longer can you just delete cookies and assume that you are safe from lurking eyes of others who choose to follow your every move and collect information on you.

At one time I thought all that was needed was good AV and Firewall software. In addition to AV & Firewalls, is it a good idea to now install Spyware software as another security layer?

Can you give me some advice on this and how all this software either replaces old technologies or builds on a new layer needed to protect systems from the perils of the internet.

All Comments

A good resource

Most cookies are used by a site to store temporary information about a visitor, so that when they visit another page on that site, their info will be "remembered" and they can be treated more personally. Such cookies provide valuable assistance in making a site more "friendly".

A "Spyware cookie" is any cookie that is not used only by a single site for its private interactions with its users, but is shared across sites. When multiple sites read from the same cookie, or when they pass info from the cookie on to another site, those sites effectively share information.

Some Spyware cookies may collect information from multiple sites, as they are visited, then share this info with multiple sites, as they are visited. Other spyware cookies simply provide a unique identification of a user. Many users consider any word, token, number, or code "private" if it uniquely identifies them, even if it is not their name or email address. A typical spyware cookie might look like this: "1 www.somedomainname.com/ 0 2719785088 29508922 2980377808 29496852 * " The encoded info in this cookie includes a unique UserID assigned by a web server; the cookie can be used to track a user as they visit other sites that accept this cookie.

Spyware cookies are not dangerous, and invade your privacy very little. Nonetheless, some folks hate them, and many are glad that PestPatrol can find and remove them.

Cookie time

A cookie is used for identification and are not alway's a bad thing. If you use an online email service like hotmail then those are used to identify you when you go to log in (doesn't record password data).Spyware is now being bundled with free programs and are becoming a big problem since they can change you home page, slow down your computer and can even cause it to crash (I've re-programmed several because of this problem). If you would like futher assistance with this please feel free to contact me at crzzytraincomputers@fuse.net and I would be glad to help you.

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